How well does 2012's software run on 2009's iPhone? Ars finds out.

One of the iOS platform's advantages over its competitors is that official software updates are not just provided to older devices, but provided in a timely manner on a single date. It gives older phones and tablets a nice longevity boost, and allows Apple to continue selling older hardware that works and acts much like its newer counterparts.

The downside of that approach is that only Apple gets to decide if your hardware is worthy of an update. This can cause two problems: the first is that owners of not-so-old devices can be left with old software, as is happening to owners of the original iPad (which was, believe it or not, still the newest iPad available just 18 months ago). The second is that an update can be pushed out to devices that aren't ready to handle it, as happened when the iPhone 3G received the iOS 4.0 update in 2010.

That update wasn't just missing features compared to the version of iOS 4.0 that shipped for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS—it also made previously existing functionality much slower. Now iOS 6 is here, and the iPhone 3GS is in a similar position: it has just come off the market, and it's using less RAM and a slower processor than the other supported devices. Does iOS 6 make the iPhone 3GS an unusable mess, or can people with older phones perform the update without reservations?

What don't you get?

Apple has been restricting certain iOS features to certain devices since iOS 4, and iOS 6 is probably the most confusing example of this yet, mostly because there are now many different iOS products with varying performance levels.

As the oldest supported device, the 3GS misses out on the largest number of features: it can't use the 3D Flyover or turn-by-turn navigation features of the new Maps app (restricted to the iPhone 4S and newer), Panorama mode (iPhone 4S or newer), or the offline reading list feature (iPhone 4 or newer). Features from older iOS versions that didn't make it to the 3GS are still not present in iOS 6: these include location-based Reminders (iPhone 4 and newer), WiFi Personal Hotspot (iPhone 4 and newer), FaceTime (iPhone 4 and newer), AirPlay Mirroring (4S and newer) and Siri (iPhone 4S and newer).

These missing features generally don't change the operation of the phone—they're simply not present. One app that does change is Maps: on newer devices, getting directions from "current location" invokes the turn-by-turn navigation feature. There's also a button in the lower-left corner of the screen that you can tap to bring up all the steps in your route.

On the 3GS, getting directions from your current location brings up a list of driving directions that you can swipe through to see where you're going—swiping from the left brings up the next step, and swiping from the right brings up the previous one. There's also no button to tap to bring up all of the steps at once, which seems like an odd omission to me. (If you have a newer phone and would like to see how this works, you get the same interface if you use anything other than "current location" as your starting point when getting directions.)

The iPhone 3GS gets the new Maps app, but without the turn-by-turn navigation feature.

Otherwise, Maps on the 3GS brings all of the changes it features on newer phones, including Yelp reviews, the revamped interface, and the lack of integrated public transit directions.

What do you get, and how fast is it?

Aside from the growing list of features restricted only to newer phones, the iPhone 3GS actually gets most of the new OS's tweaks and refinements—iOS 4 set expectations low on the iPhone 3G by excluding some of that version's best improvements, so it's nice to see the older handset so well-supported in this case. With the exception of the Siri and Maps sections, just about everything mentioned in our main iOS 6 review applies to the 3GS, including Passbook support, Facebook integration, shared Photo Streams, revamped sharing menus, Do Not Disturb, iCloud Tabs in Safari, the new Find My iPhone tweaks, the Camera app's exposure lock, the new Mail features, and the new call features, among others.

The new features also don't slow the phone down appreciably. To give you some idea of performance relative to iOS 5.1.1, we launched some standard apps in both versions to measure application launch times. These numbers measure the number of seconds starting from when the app icon is tapped and ending when it becomes usable:

Application

iOS 5.1.1

iOS 6.0

Safari

1.3 seconds

1.4 seconds

Camera

2.0 seconds

2.3 seconds

Settings

1.8 seconds

1.7 seconds

Mail

1.3 seconds

2.1 seconds

Messages

2.4 seconds

2.4 seconds

Calendar

1.4 seconds

1.6 seconds

Phone

1.1 seconds

1.0 seconds

Most of the results are well within the margin of error, with the exception of Mail, which consistently took around an extra second to launch. In practice, the phone feels about the same as it did running iOS 5—occasional stuttering and nowhere near as snappy as my current 4S, but still responsive to input in a way that the iPhone 3G with iOS 4 was not.

We also ran our standard suite of smartphone benchmarks on the 3GS under both iOS 5.1.1 and iOS 6 to see if there were any improvements or regressions. While GLBenchmark and Geekbench scores remain unchanged from iOS 5, improvements made to Safari's JavaScript engine continue to benefit the 3GS just as they benefit newer models.

While iOS 6 doesn't slow the 3GS down compared to iOS 5, the phone is still getting pretty long in the tooth—three years is a long time in technology. That goes doubly for the smartphone and tablet industries, where a doubling of performance between product generations is still possible.

Conclusions

Even if you subscribe to the belief that each year's iPhone improvements are merely incremental (and I tend to upgrade my phone hardware once every two years, myself), the jump in performance and features that you get by moving two or three generations at once really add up to a substantially better experience.

iOS 6 doesn't make the iPhone 3GS any slower or more difficult to use than it was before, which should be good news to anyone who keeps theirs around as a secondary or backup phone—indeed, it's pleasantly surprising how many of the refinements and improvements make their way down to Apple's oldest-supported piece of iOS hardware. However, that hardware has been surpassed so thoroughly by other iOS and Android handsets at this point that it's difficult to recommend it as a primary handset. You don't have much to lose if you upgrade a 3GS to iOS 6, but there's a lot more to gain by investing in a newer device.

Promoted Comments

iOS 6 is available for the 3GS, but not the original iPad. Why on earth not?

3GS = June 2009 - 600MHz Cortex-A8iPad = April 2010 - 1GHz Cortex-A8

I believe it's a RAM issue. The CPU is better in the iPad, but the device has the same amount of RAM (a mere 256MB). I still heavily use my original iPad, having decided to wait until the 4th gen to update, and I've found the RAM issue is a far worse problem on it than on a 3GS due to the larger assets used for 1024x768 resolution iPad apps (whereas the 3GS is just 480x320).

The situation stinks, and I recall thinking *immediately* upon the iPad's launch that the 256MB RAM was going to cause problems as a bottleneck before the rest of the device really fell behind, but it's how things are.

551 posts | registered Feb 21, 2006

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

Well you're way wrong about SunSpider, a lower score there is better. And if you're going to argue using a margin of error like the article said, you're grasping at straws. Mail was the only big loser.

It's good to see that the people who approved iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G appear to be no longer running the show.

Even with 4.2.1 (the last version for the 3G) it took forever to start apps (which would often give up and return you to the home screen), answering a call took several seconds between tapping "accept" and the call connecting, many apps became extremely sluggish and maps became practically unusable.

I'm not surprised that Andrew was hesitant, I would be too based on that experience.

Well you're way wrong about SunSpider, a lower score there is better. And if you're going to argue using a margin of error like the article said, you're grasping at straws. Mail was the only big loser.

I think samdamdam was agreeing with you. His last line needed the word "but". "That's better, not slower, but faster."

Some tests appeared a little slower (load times) but sunspider was faster. Net difference? Not much.

Except in 4 of the 7 tests we tested it on. And the Sunspider benchmark.

Love the objectivity Ars...keep it up.

In your excitement to attack ARS for being insufficiently negative about the results, you missed the "LOWER IS BETTER" caption on the Sunspider results, eh?

Me, I am highly suspicious of any test that claims to measure the difference between 1.3s and 1.4s on UI interactions. It can be done -- use a video camera, do the test 10 or more times, throw out the highest and lowest results, computing a real margin of error -- but was ARS actually that rigorous?

The problem is that iOS 5 already slowed down the 3GS, at least in my experience. Since I upgraded my phone has not been the same. So while I may upgrade my 3GS to iOS 6, it will only be a month or so. It's time for a new iPhone and I'm ordering one.

@Tallon: sorry, I can't give you a bullet list of advantages but as someone who has used both the 3GS and the 4S, I can guess that my move to the iPhone 5 is going to be an enormous jump, because the 4S is much snappier in everyday use than the 3G. I believe the analogy is very much with the Mac upgrade curve, but the timeline is compressed. Each new iOS and the apps designed with faster processors in mind and "heavier" OSs in mind put more and more demands on the phone, so that your phone feels slower and slower.

Except in 4 of the 7 tests we tested it on. And the Sunspider benchmark.

Love the objectivity Ars...keep it up.

"Milliseconds, lower is better"

All of the scores but Mail, as I said, are within the margin of error. I sat with a stopwatch and timed this out, so I think 0.1 and 0.2 of a second is down to my response speed and not the phone.

Not sure what the extra wait in Mail is for, and this one may obviously change based on how many mail accounts you have configured (my setup in iOS 5.1.1 and 6.0 was identical, so at the very least this is an apples-to-apples comparison). Subjectively I can't really tell the difference between 1.3 and 2.1 seconds without timing it but that will vary from person to person.

Given the recent spate of battery life issues with Apple OS upgrades, did you do a battery time test? That's what's really keeping me away from trying it on my iPhone 4 right now. Although it just now occurs to me that your 3GS probably has a significantly reduced capacity from a fresh one anyway unless you've changed the battery recently.

Except in 4 of the 7 tests we tested it on. And the Sunspider benchmark.

Love the objectivity Ars...keep it up.

In your excitement to attack ARS for being insufficiently negative about the results, you missed the "LOWER IS BETTER" caption on the Sunspider results, eh?

Me, I am highly suspicious of any test that claims to measure the difference between 1.3s and 1.4s on UI interactions. It can be done -- use a video camera, do the test 10 or more times, throw out the highest and lowest results, computing a real margin of error -- but was ARS actually that rigorous?

No video cameras here - just a guy and a stopwatch. I launched each app several times (killing the app in the multitasking bar between runs to make sure the app was all the way out of the phone's memory) to make sure I was getting consistent results between runs, however.

Given the recent spate of battery life issues with Apple OS upgrades, did you do a battery time test? That's what's really keeping me away from trying it on my iPhone 4 right now. Although it just now occurs to me that your 3GS probably has a significantly reduced capacity from a fresh one anyway unless you've changed the battery recently.

Yeah it's a three-year-old battery at this point, so any battery life test would probably reflect that. I can say that on my 4S it doesn't seem like the battery life is any worse than it was in iOS 5.1 (which fixed a bunch of battery issues it was having under 5.0), but I'll admit that it's not a scientific comparison.

I wonder what keeps Turn by Turn and Siri off of the 3GS (besides marketing?) The OG Droid had no issue with Turn by turn as it really pulls the routing from the network when you give it your start/end points. I'd assume the new Maps.app does the same thing. The fact that it's also missing from the iPhone 4 tells me it's a marketing play.

My iPhone4 does turn by turn navigation just fine with a couple GPS/Maps apps (which I'll continue to use of course). And Siri is just server side, proven to have worked fine on jailbroken older iPhones.

I find it worse than the Android handsent makers who don't release updates. At least there you know that they clearly don't care about old hardware. Apple makes a show of it, but really just craps on older users in an attempt to get them to upgrade their phone.

It is a pain to leave the Apple eco-system if you have collected a lot of iTunes purchases. Apple knows this and just leverages the missing features as a way to twist you into a new phone.

- HTC HD2.- Three years old.- Single core Snapdragon.- Not intended to run Android at all.- Jellybean with 100% features working. (; - (Edit: Whoopsie, I actually meant more than 100% thanks to Cyanogenmod!)

I'm still rocking a 3GS and decided to wait one more upgrade cycle. Battery life is still allright (bluetooth and push off though), and I simply don't feel the need to upgrade. Could do with a better camera, but that's about it.

- HTC HD2.- Three years old.- Single core Snapdragon.- Not intended to run Android at all.- Jellybean with 100% features working. (; - (Edit: Whoopsie, I actually meant more than 100% thanks to Cyanogenmod!)

XDA Developers really is a fantastic community.

I think an apples to apples comparison would be if HTC still supported your phone.

- HTC HD2.- Three years old.- Single core Snapdragon.- Not intended to run Android at all.- Jellybean with 100% features working. (; - (Edit: Whoopsie, I actually meant more than 100% thanks to Cyanogenmod!)

XDA Developers really is a fantastic community.

I think an apples to apples comparison would be if HTC still supported your phone.

Is that the best comeback you have? Android users don't need no stinking warranty. q; It was already out of warranty a year ago though, even if I didn't mess with it, because I don't extend them. It's just a toy at this point anyway though, I have had a Galaxy Nexus for some time (and already modded that too).

Say, does that mean you have opted never to jailbreak your device? I just wonder since I see people saying "oh well, you get the missing features anyway if you do".